Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Site Graduated!
As you can see the new design just went live. Which means this site has been officially launched! Congratulations! Thank you for your valuable design feedback.
We have also themed the twitter account ...
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Site design for Biology community
EDIT 02:
Here is the updated main illustration including most of your feedback.
EDIT 01:
Thanks for your great feedback! This is exactly what I needed, it's hard to know some of the details when ...
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"Vote early, vote often"
This is a reproduction of Scott Morrison's post on meta.tex.SE; I believe it is very much applicable to this community as well:
I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this "question" is ...
user132
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Shouldn't we be more tolerant with newcomers and non-biologists?
I am often disturbed by how easily the community of Biology.SE close and down vote questions asked by newcomers and layman.
When I go on other SE websites, I often have to ask unclear questions or ...
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Updating statement on closed reason for no work shown
The statement for closing based on no work shown I believe shouldn't include the word homework. Not everyone posting a PSQ (problem statement question) is actually doing homework. When they read:
...
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Biology.SE and professional biologists?
@Terdon made an interesting observation in the chat room recently:
The simple truth is that we've never been a site for biologists. Those
of us who answer are usually biologists or in similar ...
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Shall we have MathJax?
For people not familiar with this name -- MathJax is a plugin which converts LaTeX math markup like $X_1^2$ into proper math notation, in this case .
On one hand equations may appear here too rare to ...
user59
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Biology —Top User Swag!
This has been shipped today (August 2nd)! Enjoy your swag, everyone :)
If you still don't have yours and think you should have it by now, please send me an e-mail so I can look into it instead of ...
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What is the long-term vision for this site?
I have only really been active here for about 3 months, so I’m not very familiar with this site’s policies and ambitions. On some sites I participate in, there is a vision that seems to be shared, ...
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2015 Community Moderator Election Results
Biology's 1st moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the 3 new moderators are:
They've replaced the pro tempore crew — please thank both teams for volunteering, ...
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Are questions about creationism or intelligent design on-topic here?
Our first creationism/intelligent design question https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/649/is-cell-division-irreducibly-complex#question has received a lot of downvotes, some close votes and a ...
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What are some good, informative comments I can leave for new users?
Many questions on this site are from new/low-reputation users who may not know all of the common rules and expectations of Biology and SE sites in general. Compounding this is the fact that users ...
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Do we need to change voting patterns?
It is obvious that voting patterns differ dramatically between topics. From my personal experience, answers that lie closer to my own work and the ones I put most effort into receive relatively few ...
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Voting to close a question as off-topic because it is based on a faulty presupposition
Over the last maybe 6 months or so (I haven't really been keeping track), I've noticed a number of questions either nominated for closure or actually closed with some variant of this custom close ...
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Why don't many of 'us' users vote more often?
A comment by Rover Eye which can be found here got me thinking.
I'll have to agree with @canadianer on this one. Bio SE has a bit of a lower voting and acceptance rate, in the SE ecosystem. – ...
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Why are we STILL in Beta? How can we fix this?
I asked this question more than two years ago:
What are the chances that we make it out of Beta?
One of my favorite "quotes" from that question:
It is mid-September and things don't seem to ...
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Questions asking for evolutionary reasons
We do get a lot of questions that ask for why evolution did not lead to situation-X?
Recent examples:
Why don't mosquitoes evolve towards muting themselves?
https://biology.stackexchange.com/q/...
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Rethinking the "Homework" close reason
Reading through Meta after seeing a lot of homework-related closures, I found quite a few questions that address our community's confusion with the homework close reason:
Is it right to close “easy ...
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Drive for the use of correct English on Biology SE
I realise that for a great number of users English is not their native language, and therefore the English writing will frequently contain mistakes. I have no issue spending some of my time making ...
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Should we encourange the relevant questions from non-professionals?
There are already a couple of questions from non-professionals, like this question about action potental, for example. This question is likely to be closed soon, there are already some closing votes ...
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Should we worry about the amount of non-expert content on the site?
We're nearly 100 days into the beta now, and we have accumulated some nice content here on the site. But one aspect I'm a bit concerned about is the amount of laymen questions compared to expert ...
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2019 Community Moderator Election Results
Biology's third moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied and the two new moderators are:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly—please thank them for ...
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Clarifying our scope with regards to medical questions
There is a rather large amount of overlap between biology and medicine, and as we get more questions that are rather far on the medical site it is time to revisit the issue and clarify where exactly ...
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Is it bad to mention if a specific article is open access or paywalled?
I received an edit on the question Why “Having chlorophyll without photosynthesis is actually very dangerous” and “like living with a bomb”?
Removed reference to paywalling. Nature is a print ...
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Ethical considerations on use and abuse of animals
I wish to raise the attention on ethics and animals. It was fueled by https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/35902/producing-artificial-gunnison-prairie-dog-calls-or-scent-to-attract-the-prairie, ...
AliceDMod
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General quality of BioSE questions vs other SEs
At the risk of this being the very thing I'm kind of moaning about, I'm wondering what others think of the general quality of BioSE questions?
My contributions to SE outside of Bio are mostly ...
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Is wikipedia authoring here necessary and allowed?
I'm very glad this site finally launched after the long area51 odysee. But one of the first and highest voted questions I saw today looks very dissappointing to me, esp. when trying to attract experts ...
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This website is incredibly unfriendly to interdisciplinary discourse
was excited to come to this website and start regularly sharing my in-depth knowledge of modern biological research, but it seems the biology sub frequently decides, inaccurately and inconsistently, ...
user47696
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Not all questions featuring something biological are biology questions
Something I think we need to clear up in terms of what is and is not on-topic, are questions where the user asks something that is not a biological question and then attempting to justify it being ...
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Including health advice in the personal medical questions off-topic reason
The current custom off-topic close reason for medical advice is the following
Personal medical questions are off-topic on Biology. We can not safely
answer questions for your specific situation ...
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Is this SE site / community dead?
I'm new to this SE site and as a geneticist i liked the idea to be able to help newbies and explain simple genetic facts to the community. But after one week following this site activities, I found ...
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Where do we draw the line for questions about medicine?
There is a large overlap between medicine and biology, a lot of medical questions are in the end questions about human biology. Where do we want to draw the line on medical questions, when are they ...
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Permanent Off-Topic criterion: Questions based on religious/mythical stories and intelligent design
This has been discussed before but these types of questions keep coming.
Should we add questions about creationism/mythical stories/intelligent design as one of the permanently listed off topic ...
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Homework Policy for FAQ
The answer to this question explains how to ask your homework question here on Biology and have it well received by the community.
Related:
What is the policy regarding homework questions? (Old)
Are ...
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is this question about epidemiology on-topic?
Having a small comment-debate about this question. All I can find in What topics can I ask about here? is that this site is for
[questions about] biology and closely related fields, including ... ...
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This is the title of the meta post I just wrote
Annoying isn't it? The title on this question tells you nothing about the content of the post. Yet this happens. Its been happening a lot recently here on biology SE. And some users are repeat ...
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What is the usefulness of closing poorly researched questions?
I had an interesting debate elsewhere on SE about closing poorly researched questions. Basically the consensus came down to the following meta posts:
Embrace the non-Googlers
How should we deal ...
AliceDMod
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2017 Community Moderator Election Results
Biology's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderator is:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and ...
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What to do with Bioinformatics programming questions
This recent question on Bioinformatics is an example of pretty hardcore programming questions. An excerpt is given below. Apparently 'Owl' is used for gene sequencing, but I had to google it up with ...
AliceDMod
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Replacement for "Homework" close reason
I'd like to prompt suggestions for replacement of the "homework" reason.
I've taken the format from https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4710/new-audience-specific-texts-for-our-...
Bryan KrauseMod
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Comment templates to provide to new users or users who need a reminder
This post inspired to start a comment template thread for Bio. Many SE sites make use of type of thread to added new and experienced users alike to provide clear, constructive comments to users who ...
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Community Promotion Ads - 2015
Congratulations on receiving a new design! Included with your new design is the Community Promotion Ads system. For those who are unfamiliar with how this works, please read onwards!
What are ...
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2015 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic ...
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When are citations needed in an answer?
With the site's graduation and increase in low-rep visitors, some of whom are beginning to answer, I (and many others) have had to comment a number of times that answers need to be supported by ...
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Another reload on species identification
We have had discussions about this before (the linked post mentions several other, even older posts), but I think it is time for another revamp.
We have an increasing number of species ID questions ...
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What is to be done with questions that have no answers yet?
The issue of unanswered question fraction is always in discussion (and it being a factor for site graduation).
In my opinion a lot of mechanisms are unknown in biology (even for some commonly ...
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Should we [always] ask for references?
I have possibly spent too much time on Skeptics.SE... but I think we should be a bit more strict in requiring good references for answers.
Take for instance these questions (I hope the answerers do ...
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Should we use broad categories for tagging?
Biology is an extremely wide field, questions ranging from zoology, botany to biochemistry are all on-topic here. A mechanism for users to get a rough selection of questions they are actually ...
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Voting down answers because you don't like the question
I have noticed a pattern that some people seem to vote down answers to questions not because they have any actual objection to the answer but because they do not approve of the question.
A recent ...
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Suggest expanding Biology's scope
I asked a question recently about a rumored biological mechanism that I was ignorant about.
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/30078/is-there-any-truth-to-at-will-pregnancy-rejection
My ...
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